The election of Donald Trump as U.S. president last year raised the specter of economic recession in Mexico, sent the country's peso into a tailspin, and threatened local industry such as car making.

But four months on, Mexican automobile output is accelerating fast, unemployment is at a nine-year low, and the peso has been one of the world's best-performing currencies in 2017.

Since diplomatic ties reached a nadir in January with the cancellation of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto's planned meeting with Trump, business confidence has slowly returned.

Fears that Trump could tear up the NAFTA trade treaty have subsided, and so far the hit to foreign investment has been slight, said Gilberto Fimbres, head of Mexican employers' federation Coparmex in the northern border city of Tijuana.

"The storm of the great talker, the big negotiator, descended on us," he said. "Then it turns out that all these great things, the great threat, weren't so great in the end."

Instead, Mexican auto production leapt 36 percent in March, capping the strongest start to any year since 2011. The same month, growth in new manufacturing orders was the highest in six months, the Markit Purchasing Managers' Index showed.

Mexican tourists once flocked to the U.S. during Easter week. This year they're elsewhere — and they blame Trump

Rafael Sifuentes Barba normally spends Holy Week visiting the United States. It’s a tradition Barba started when he got his tourist visa four years ago, and he’s enjoyed traveling to San Antonio, New York and San Francisco for shopping and sightseeing. He says he often spends $1,000 a day on such trips.

But this year, Barba canceled his Easter week trip, along with the jaunt he usually makes in December for Christmas shopping. ...

Tourism Economics, a global research firm, estimates that lost visits from Mexico to the U.S. this year will total 1.8 million — a 7% drop from the previous year — with direct economic loss of $1.1 billion.

The firm estimates that Mexico-to-U.S. travel will diminish even further in 2018, with 2.6 million lost visits and direct economic losses totaling $1.6 billion.

Barba, for one, said he will wait until President Trump leaves office to return to the United States.

‘I need help!’ This activist pleaded on Facebook Live in Mexico. Then he vanished.

Stranded on the shoulder of a busy highway in a crime-ridden area of Mexico, Hugo Castro took to Facebook Live to broadcast a desperate call for help.

Castro, a U.S. citizen and migrant rights activist based in San Diego, said he had run out of Mexican pesos and was unable to pay for a taxi or bus with U.S. dollars. He claimed he was being followed by a criminal organization for the past several days, and he feared for his life. On Thursday evening, the group cornered him on the road to Puebla, Mexico, about 66 miles southeast of the capital.

That 20-minute harrowing message was the last anyone heard from Castro, a longtime volunteer with Border Angels, an immigrant rights advocacy group. His family had reported him missing a day earlier. The ensuing disappearance has prompted searches by authorities in the United States and Mexico, spurred weekend vigils in San Diego and heightened concerns about the growing number of people missing under suspicious circumstances in Mexico.

U.S. consular officials in Mexico confirmed Monday they are assisting in the search for Castro, a spokesman told KPBS, a public broadcaster in San Diego.

Machine learning is being used to uncover the mass graves of Mexico’s missing

In March of this year, a massive grave was uncovered buried beneath the soil of the coastal Mexican state of Veracruz. The grave made national headlines because it contained more than 240 skulls and corpses, the remains of disappeared people (link in Spanish).

But for many, the grave’s existence came as no surprise. In Mexico, a country where almost 30,000 people have gone missing due to drug-related violence since 2006, the grave was a reminder of a difficult reality: the search for missing people often begins by looking underground.

Mexico is home to over 122 million people and spans more than 750,000 square miles of land. There is no road map that makes clear where to start the search for mass graves, or the bodies of the disappeared (desaparecidos) that they hold.

Or at least there hasn’t been—until now. A team of multi-country researchers, data scientists, and statisticians is using machine learning to predict which counties in Mexico are most likely to have hidden graves. If their model works as well as they hope, it will be a powerful application of an emerging technology that provide answers to one of the most difficult aspects of the desaparecidos problem: knowing where to look.

Missing San Diego Activist Recovering After Being Found Beaten In Mexico

Border Angels Founder Enrique Morones is working with the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City to have his volunteer coordinator Hugo Castro transferred to a San Diego hospital from the Red Cross facility in the State of Mexico.

The San Diego activist is receiving medical attention and is stable after being found wounded Tuesday on an street called Avenida San Rafael in Tlalnepantla de Baz, a city in the State of Mexico, Mexico's attorney general said in a press release Tuesday. He had been missing for nearly five days.

Investigators at the office of the special prosecutor for disappeared persons received an anonymous phone call describing his location.

Details surrounding his disappearance are still unclear, but the office of Mexico's attorney general said it has since launched an investigation into "the illegal deprivation of freedom" of Castro.

MEXICO CITY — Mexico has surpassed 2,000 homicides in a month for the first time since the summer of 2011 and had more killings in the first quarter of 2017 than in the start of any year in at least two decades, according to data released Friday.

Unlike 2011, when bloody cartel clashes in Ciudad Juarez drove the national toll to new heights, the killings pushing the 2017 total have been spread across a number of states. Authorities attribute them to vicious turf battles resulting from breakdowns in the leadership of some cartels and the splintering of others into smaller gangs.

The southern state of Guerrero, where Acapulco is located, continues to be the homicide leader, with 550 during the first three months of the year.

But Baja California Sur with 133 slayings during the first quarter had the largest year-on-year percentage increase, skyrocketing 682 percent from the 17 homicides it had during the same period in 2016. A territorial dispute between the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels is believed to be driving much of the violence in the southern part of the peninsula popular with foreign tourists.

Nationally, there were 2,020 homicides in March, up about 11 percent from February. For January through March, the national total was 5,775 killings, up 29 percent from the same three months last year.

Even as the Trump administration jousts with Canada over its latest trade dispute, it might want to keep a closer eye on Mexico, America’s No. 1 one dairy importer. Its southern neighbor, which figures prominently in the U.S. government’s crime and immigration rhetoric, spent almost twice as much money as Canada did on U.S. dairy in 2016. That’s $1.2 billion.

Now it appears Mexico is looking for new trading partners.

In the first two months of 2017, Mexico increased its imports of skim milk powder from the European Union by 122 percent over last year, according to the EU Milk Market Observatory (as first reported by the Irish Farm Journal). Mexico has also been exploring talks with dairy powerhouse New Zealand. That country’s trade minister visited Mexico City in February to discuss a potential trade deal.

Why the moves by Mexico? In a word: Trump.

“Mexico is looking to make sure they have market alternatives because of the rhetoric from the U.S. on renegotiating Nafta,” said D. Scott Brown, who teaches agricultural and applied economics at the University of Missouri, referring to the North American Free Trade Agreement. “This may be an opportunity to find other places for skim milk powder.” Rabobank also reported that tensions between the U.S. and Mexico are the reason for Mexico’s changing dairy purchasing strategy.

While most Americans probably aren’t looking for skim milk powder at the supermarket, it’s a major export product (along with nonfat dry milk) because it has low moisture content and a longer shelf life. These products are “the barometer for what’s going on in world markets,” said Ben Laine, an economist at CoBank Acb.

Mexico’s lost generation of young girls robbed of innocence and education

Hundreds of thousands of young girls across Mexico are being driven into relationships and marriages with older men, denying them a childhood and an education, new research reveals.

Of the 320,000-plus Mexican girls between the ages of 12 and 17 who are cohabiting, nearly 70% are with a partner who is at least 11 years their senior, according to a report commissioned by the Ford Foundation.

The data represents part of a wider trend across Latin America, the only region in the world where child marriage is increasing rather than in decline. ...

The findings, due to be published next month by a Mexico City-based research group, also show that 25,000 girls aged between 12 and 14 are living in “early unions”.

The report comes weeks after the secretary general of the Organization of American States, Luis Almagro, issued a statement pledging to tackle child marriage in Latin America. “With one in five girls married or living in informal unions before the age of 18 we are losing entire generations to poverty, discrimination and violence,” he said.

The headlines were as stark as they were shocking: Mexico is the second deadliest country in the world.

According to an annual survey by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Mexico in 2016 was more violent than war zones such as Afghanistan or Yemen, with a death toll surpassed only by that of Syria. ...

According to the IISS, the bloodletting is comparable to that of a civil war. “It is very rare for criminal violence to reach a level akin to armed conflict. But this has happened in the Northern Triangle of Central America (Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador) and, especially, Mexico,” the IISS report said.

“The first two months of 2017 were the most violent January and February on record, with 3,779 homicide cases registered by the authorities,” the report said, adding that the more than 35,000 displaced persons, state weakness and corruption and increased militarization of gangs “illustrate how Mexico’s violence has reached a level akin to armed conflicts”.

But analysts in Mexico cast doubt on the IISS methodology and questioned why the country was singled out in the ensuing coverage.

Mexico’s conservative opposition National Action Party (PAN) and the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) have called for a “broad alliance” for the 2018 presidential elections in an attempt to oust the ruling PRI party and halt maverick leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The two parties — the first, the party of the business establishment and the second, a dwindling force that has lost a stream of members to Mr López Obrador’s Morena party — have very different ideologies, but say they want to install a coalition government in Latin America’s second-biggest economy for the first time.

An alliance between them worked well in local elections last year and will deliver again in upcoming state polls, Ricardo Anaya, PAN leader, told a news conference.

“Because of this, we’ve discussed the suitability of rallying a broad opposition alliance for the 2018 elections,” he said, adding that they hoped all opposition parties, academics and social leaders would unite behind a clear programme to transform the country.

The aim would be “to get rid of the PRI, for certain, and to give Mexico a coalition government, an honest government delivering results for the benefit of the people”, Mr Anaya said.

Wind turbines were planted along a strip of Mexico’s southern coast to make the country’s power industry cleaner. Now they’re spilling oil.

In the town of Juchitan last month, a clean-up was under way around a generator owned by Electricite de France. Workers wearing goggles and masks were scrubbing off a copper-colored lubricant that dripped down from the turbine. They had wrapped cloth around its base, to absorb further leakage, and stuffed contaminated soil and stones into plastic trash bags.

Flor, who owns the land where the turbine is sited and rents it to EDF, said she arrived on the scene after being alerted by a neighbor. “The stench was terrible, like a sort of burned fuel or ammonia,” she said, asking not to be identified by her surname out of concern over reprisals. “The trees were glistening with oil.” Similar problems have been reported all along the Tehuantepec isthmus, one of the western hemisphere’s windiest places.

While the leaks are limited in scope and probably pose no immediate health risk, they look bad — and that’s yet another headache for Mexico’s energy reformers, who are seeking to make more use of renewable sources as state monopolies open up to private capital. The plan has succeeded in attracting global investment, and wind power is getting its share, with more than $6.9 billion already pledged. But it’s also stirring up all kinds of local opposition, which could soon rebound against President Enrique Pena Nieto’s governing party at the ballot box.

Deadly violence continues to climb in Mexico, where an ascendant cartel is strengthening its grip on power

Deadly violence declined slightly between March and April this year in Mexico, but the first four months of the year marked a grisly milestone.

The first one-third of 2017 saw 8,705 homicide victims throughout Mexico, 32% more than in the same period last year and 49.8% more than were recorded between January and April 2015.

The increase in homicides registered over the first four months of this year continue the reversal of the declines seen during the first two years of President Enrique Peña Nieto's term, which began in December 2012.

The 7,727 homicide cases during the first four months of the year exceed even that of the same period in 2011, when narco violence in the country was at full throat under then-President Felipe Calderon. (Mexico has released data on homicide cases, which can include more than one victim, since 1997. Data on victims has only been released since 2014.)

According to Mexican news site Animal Politico, each of the five security zones established in 2013 as part of Peña Nieto's national security plan has seen increases in homicides ranging from 10% to 60%.

A tower of human skulls unearthed beneath the heart of Mexico City has raised new questions about the culture of sacrifice in the Aztec Empire after crania of women and children surfaced among the hundreds embedded in the forbidding structure.

Archaeologists have found more than 650 skulls caked in lime and thousands of fragments in the cylindrical edifice near the site of the Templo Mayor, one of the main temples in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, which later became Mexico City.

The tower is believed to form part of the Huey Tzompantli, a massive array of skulls that struck fear into the Spanish conquistadores when they captured the city under Hernan Cortes, and mentioned the structure in contemporary accounts.

Historians relate how the severed heads of captured warriors adorned tzompantli, or skull racks, found in a number of Mesoamerican cultures before the Spanish conquest.

But the archaeological dig in the bowels of old Mexico City that began in 2015 suggests that picture was not complete.

This was once one of the safest parts of Mexico, a place where people fleeing the nation’s infamous drug battles would come for sanctuary. Now, officials here in Tecomán, a quiet farming town in the coastal state of Colima, barely shrug when two murders occur within hours of each other. It’s just not that uncommon any more.

Last year, the town became the deadliest municipality in all of Mexico, with a homicide rate similar to a war zone’s, according to an independent analysis of government data. This year it is on track to double that figure, making it perhaps the most glaring example of a nationwide crisis.

Mexico is reaching its deadliest point in decades. Even with more than 100,000 deaths, 30,000 people missing and billions of dollars tossed into the furnace of Mexico’s decade-long fight against organized crime, the flames have not died down. By some measures, they are only getting worse.

The last couple of months have set particularly ominous records: More homicide scenes have emerged across Mexico than at any point since the nation began keeping track 20 years ago. ...

The government’s monthly statistics, which date back to 1997, suggest a hard road ahead. The data tracks crime scenes, where one, two or ten killings may have occurred. May and June, the latest months available, set consecutive records for the most homicide scenes in the last 20 years.

The total number of homicides in Mexico is also climbing quickly. According to the government’s monthly tally, which goes back to 2014, May and June also set consecutive records for the most total homicides. This year is on pace to be the deadliest yet.

Marín is contributing to an increasing demand for air travel between the United States and Mexico attributed partly to growing business ties between the two countries and rising international tourism by Mexico’s surging middle class. Then, there’s the never-ending desire to visit family, which points to changing demographics in the U.S.

To serve the swelling market on both sides of the border, airlines including American, Alaska and Southwest recently added dozens of new routes or increased flight frequency to connect major business hubs and tourist hot-spots in both countries.

In December, Delta Air Lines will launch its first daily Los Angeles-to-Mexico City flights since 2005. That is on top of the five new nonstop U.S.-to-Mexico flights the Atlanta-based carrier announced in May, as part of a cooperation agreement with Aeromexico.

Beyond the predictable destinations, airlines are adding less-expected routes between the U.S. and Mexico including Los Angeles to León and Atlanta to Queretaro.

Aeromexico this year expanded its daily nonstop service between industrial hub Monterrey, Mexico, and Detroit, described by the Mexico City-based airline in its announcement as “a U.S. city known for its development and promotion of the automotive industry.”

President Trump’s insults are pushing the Mexican political system into dangerous territory.

In his landmark 1985 book, Distant Neighbors, Alan Riding, then the New York Times' Mexico City correspondent, wrote that the Mexican president, in the days of the one-party state, was all powerful except for two things he could never do: 1) reelect himself (there’s a constitutional one-term limit for Mexican presidents) and 2) bring Mexico closer to the United States.

Mexico has a long, fraught history with the United States that is evident to Mexicans, but seldom understood in Washington. For Mexicans, the United States is the country that invaded and stole half of our territory. Mexican children, to this day, are taught about the “Niños Heroes,” the young cadets who defended the Castillo de Chapultepec, the 19th-century castle in Mexico City, one even wrapping himself in the Mexican flag and jumped to his death rather than be captured by the invading yanquis. Whether or not this tale is true, Mexicans learn from an early age that it is better to die with honor than suffer humiliation from our northern neighbor.

Since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, this anti-U.S. sentiment has faded—gone dormant, even. Mexicans have grown used to trading with the U.S., and the Mexican government has managed to convince its people that cooperation with the U.S. is better than antagonism. Mexicans have gone along, reluctantly. Anyone who knows a Mexican national will see that, beyond all the niceties and friendship between neighbors, there’s always a lingering suspicion of the United States.

Fast forward to two thousand and Trump. Mexico now wakes up to his tweets and humiliations. He doesn’t even offer the usual routine condolences after an earthquake kills nearly 100 Mexicans, even though we offered that and more after Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston. All our old suspicions are confirmed: The United States is not a friend. The United States is out to get us, again. We’re back to where we were before NAFTA. ...

Mexico and the United States are at a breaking point. The political pressures in Mexico pushing our president away from the U.S. are becoming impossible to control. Trump’s tweets, which in Washington are fodder for a good laugh, are no joke in Mexico. We’ve been a strong ally and a good neighbor to the United States. With his utter recklessness and racism, Trump may be bringing an end to all that.

President Trump’s insults are pushing the Mexican political system into dangerous territory.
Mexico has a long, fraught history with the United States that is evident to Mexicans, but seldom understood in Washington. For Mexicans, the United States is the country that invaded and stole half of our territory. Mexican children, to this day, are taught about the “Niños Heroes,” the young cadets who defended the Castillo de Chapultepec, the 19th-century castle in Mexico City, one even wrapping himself in the Mexican flag and jumped to his death rather than be captured by the invading yanquis. Whether or not this tale is true, Mexicans learn from an early age that it is better to die with honor than suffer humiliation from our northern neighbor.

That is where the Marines got their red pants stripe from and is the "Halls of Montezuma" I visited Chapultepec, a beautiful place, and saw the statues of Niños Heroes. I was in eighth grade.

"It is wrong to say God made rich and poor; He only made male and female, and He gave them the Earth as their inheritance."- Thomas Paine, Forward to Agrarian JusticeCancer broke me

Why Did Trump Work Again With Democrats? ‘He Likes Us,’ Schumer Says ...

To sweeten such a deal, Mr. Schumer offered his support for enhanced border security measures, already backed by Republicans and Democrats alike, but said he would pull out of any agreement that included funding for a wall on the Mexican border.

At that point, according to two people familiar with the exchange, one of whom was in the room, Mr. Trump called on his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, the former Homeland Security secretary who has long warned against instability on the southern border.

Mr. Kelly launched into a passionate call for stouter border defenses, including his general support for a beefed-up barrier, offering a remarkably pessimistic view of Mexico’s security situation and political stability.

He likened Mexico, one of the United States’ most important trading and law enforcement partners, to Venezuela under the regime of Hugo Chávez, the former leader, suggesting it was on the verge of a collapse that would have repercussions in the United States, according to two people who attended the meeting.

MEXICO CITY — Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Friday highlighted Mexico’s efforts to stop illegal drugs and human trafficking, saying officials here are “keenly aware” of their security challenges and working with the United States to confront them.

Mattis made his comments as he flew to Mexico to join celebrations of the country’s Independence Day and meet senior Mexican officials, including Foreign Secretary Luis Videgaray.

The visit coincides with the continuing debate over President Trump’s plan to build a border wall, which is deeply unpopular in Mexico. Mattis said he wanted to “pay our respects to our southern neighbor.” The United States and Mexico have very supportive military-to-military ties, and his visit is an effort to reinforce that, he said.

“I’m going down to build the trust and show the respect on their Independence Day,” he said.

The visit marks the latest occasion in which the defense secretary is attempting to reassure a U.S. partner hostile to positions taken by the Trump administration. The defense secretary, however, has expressed frustration when he has been portrayed as at odds with the president on policy, and instead has sought to highlight the strong relationships the U.S. military has with its counterparts across the world.